This is an interesting perspective which I never thought about. KYC makes BAT basically useless, as a FIAT withdrawal would be better.
Just as instant free transactions from centralized cryptocurrencies are a nonsense (if you don't carea bout decentralization, just use visa), BAT becomes worse than fiat when forcing KYC.
Yea. I'd probably slightly more understand the need of a separate token if they actually used the smart contracts mumbo jumbo feature of Ethereum together with a browser extension like Metamask, whereas the BAT automatically gets collected to your Metamask wallet. But no, everything goes through Uphold anyway what's the point lol.
Not only that, Uphold supports a crap ton of currencies anyway, so that argument really wouldn't pass.
https://uphold.com/en/transparency%C2%A0